The latest show at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Spirited
Women: Ten Vermont Artists, is an eclectic collection of sculpture,
paintings and movable installations. The show is a smorgasbord of unique
artist voices expressing themselves in original and compelling renditions
of texture, movement, shape, tone and color. Their works posit more
questions than answers in the viewing. The women's works are mysterious
and require time to contemplate their hidden meanings and evocations.

Dana Wigdor's paintings are well crafted in tone and structure. Using
only three colors, she presents refractions of painted light breaking over
cool, wintry landscapes as atmospheric stagings for tiny mechanical
"beings" from her unconscious. The effect is subtly theatrical as these
"beings" hover like alien hang-gliders over the cold and prismed land.

In her most recent artist statement, Wigdor explains: "These are
imaginary sentient beings who float through my imagery. I want them to
appear to have feelings of their own: hopeful, curious, lost, yearning.
They are my people, developed by a process of spontaneous scribbling,
alternated with layers of thick landscape imagery. They arrive in the
painting by an intuitive process of elimination; the encroaching landscape
slowly cropping and defining their contour until their shape and position
is completely realized."

The works are doodles of a child's world of magical, mechanical toys
flying in the sky. The paintings seem to be a bridge between the cerebral,
structured world of the adult and the fantasy of childhood musings.

Usually people respond to Wigdor's work by asking if the images in her
paintings are UFOs. She notes, "They are unidentified flying objects, but
I'm not a UFO enthusiast." People seem to find their own stories in her
paintings. She explains how she is "not spoon-feeding imagery; it's
something you haven't seen before."

Dana Wigdor has been invited as a guest artist by Petria Mitchell to
display her more recent work at Windham Art Gallery's "Shared Inspiration"
show opening for this month's Gallery Walk.

Sue Rees has an extensive sculpture, stage and lighting background from
teaching at Bennington College. Her work also displays her dabble in
architecture. Her installation "All Still" is a series of brocaded gloves
or gauntlets, regal in size and material used. There is a series of
strings and gears which, when a switch is turned on, will quiver. She made
them as part of a larger installation, "the lost ones," produced after a
trip to India. She explains: "I did a residency in Modinagar, India. After
observing the gesture of hands in greeting, touching and acting, I knitted
gloves with three, four, five and six digits out of strips of multicolored
saris."

Rees explains the lack of the human figure in her work but instead
using articles of clothing to evoke the human presence: "By implying the
human presence or objects which refer to the human, it allows the viewer
to place him or herself within the world of the objects, or to remember
past actions, or past stories." It is an opportunity for the viewer to
experience the installation in one's own individual humanity.

The basket-nests of Patricia Burleson seem to be whimsical at first,
but in longer viewing are profound statements on the artifacts of women's
lives and the world's detritus. In "Dream," there are dolls, tape
measures, zippers, bottle caps, a Statue of Liberty, mini-clotheslines. It
is like your grandmother's sewing box, where a lifetime of handiwork and
mothering is contained in one nostalgic "nesting." "Paz I" and "Paz II"
are baskets of the world, including globes of the earth, ribbons, bones,
scraps of material, rhinestones, every little thing some large bird
collected for a nest encapsulating elements of the world's tragedy.
Soldiers and body parts of dolls lend the pieces a sadness on the state of
the world.